When a script has passed through multiple hands over an almost 20-year period, one assumes it must have something magnetic enough to keep it within the Hollywood ecosystem and out of the trash. Of course, it\u2019s also assumed that there\u2019s probably something a little cursed about it too but when it finally does get made, the curiosity factor is sky high. Psycho Killer, written in the mid-2000s by Seven\u2019s Andrew Kevin Walker, has had its share of almosts over the years. In 2009, Fred Durst was set to direct. In 2010, Eli Roth was set to produce. In 2011, production was set to begin. In 2015, it was supposed to get German funding. But each iteration found a snag, and it took until 2023 for the film to finally get made.<\/p>\n
Three years later, it\u2019s now finally getting released by 20th, AKA Disney, with longtime producer Gavin Polone making his directorial debut, an answer to the question of \u201cWhy this?\u2019 quietly arriving in 1,000-plus cinemas.<\/p>\n
Walker\u2019s ingenious script for Seven didn\u2019t quite lead to the career many expected (his screenplay for 8mm was so butchered he disowned it<\/a>; he had a hand in 2010\u2019s regrettable Wolfman; his Covid-shot crime thriller Windfall<\/a> was a bust) but maybe in the immediate period after his 1995 breakout another serial killer thriller with his name attached would have seemed like an obvious win. But what\u2019s so odd about Psycho Killer is that even when the script initially emerged online, back in 2007, it would have seemed like an entirely inessential B-movie then, the kind of film that might have been made on the cheap and released straight to unrated DVD.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It\u2019s then hard to understand why a film like Psycho Killer is getting any form of theatrical release at this particularly tough moment, as studios continue to lose millions trying, and mostly failing, to lure audiences away from their many screens. I kept waiting to get it, to find something distinctive that might explain why it was granted the kind of studio rollout most genre film-makers would dream of, but I left baffled. There might be just about enough competence to Polone\u2019s film-making to ensure this won\u2019t be the worst horror film of the year, but it\u2019ll probably be the least necessary.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a strange beast in that it\u2019s too straightforward and dumb to work as a crime thriller yet too dull and scare-free to work as a horror, awkwardly falling somewhere in-between. The film begins as the US finds itself in the grip of a mask-wearing serial killer (wrestler turned actor James Preston Rogers), a mysterious figure making his way across the country leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. His victims are found surrounded by satanic symbols and messages, yet the FBI remains clueless and laughably incompetent in a way that actually makes it briefly seem like a very 2026 movie after all. After her husband is murdered, police officer Jane (Barbarian\u2019s Georgina Campbell) becomes obsessed with tracking him down.<\/p>\n We follow our protagonist and antagonist in almost equal measure, like switching between video-game characters, both written with about the same depth. We\u2019re being led towards something, a reveal that will explain the spree, teased at by the killer\u2019s obsession with crimes from the past, but when the puzzle pieces fall into place, it\u2019s with a thud. There\u2019s nothing revelatory enough to justify the slog it took to get there, despite a couple of divertingly punchy moments (there\u2019s a kinetic hotel-room fight and a malevolently hammy Malcolm McDowell to briefly wake us up). I assume it\u2019s the killer\u2019s ambitious ultimate last-act plan that kept people coming back to the script, but the rushed finale plays out with such a shrug, complete with an expected, by-the-book jump-scare coda, that even those who had once coveted this story will surely see this as a failure, entirely separate from their vision of what this could be.<\/p>\n It\u2019s just a third-rate X-Files episode but without the considerable pull of Mulder and Scully, Campbell\u2019s generic grieving obsessive unable to really command. Her quest might be fruitful but the film\u2019s arduous journey out of development hell and into cinemas is without reward for those involved and those of us left watching. Psycho Killer is as hopelessly bland as its title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a script has passed through multiple hands over an almost 20-year period, one assumes it must have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-436740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}